Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the technique of creating an experience for a website or landing page visitor with an idea of increasing conversion of visitors into customers. Most of the traffic to your ecommerce website may not convert into customers including buy your products, sign ups, download your info or call your company. For converting online traffic into customers require conversion optimization tools & techniques including landing page optimization, A/B testing and a comprehensive online marketing strategy to target your audience. In order to increase conversion rate, one must tweak, modify and test the way your web pages look, the colors, design, font, the copy, images buttons etc.
Any company, whether large or small achieving higher conversion rate is very important because it not only brings them benefits of more & more customers or sign-ups but it also:
1) Makes it clear that customers exactly want what you have to offer – “product-market fit”
2) Makes you proud on spending in the marketing and hence opens door for further investments
3) Opens new marketing channels that aren’t cost-effective to your competitors
4) Helps to generate money by improving the metrics of your business that investors really care about.
CRO is basically all about getting more visitors to your website, doing what you actually want them to do on your website. Do a cross check and see for every 100 people who visit your website, how many people do you convert into sales? Now, the question is how many people could you really convert? Always remember, the ‘conversion’ may be a small or even big sale, someone downloading a book or purchasing an iPhone, whatever it is, that defines success of your business.
So let’s examine on how a senior member of the Distilled team, Paddy Moogan, outlines a five-step process:
Step 1: Gather Relevant Data:
There are many key areas to look at here but few are more important. Those include:
1) Your business goals
2) Need of your Project
3) Objections/Complaints about your product
4) Define sign-up or sales process
5) How to interact with your customers via social media networks, Gmail and also try to look for those places where customer drops-off.
6) Monitor your traffic in Google Analytics
7) Research about the technologies that your customers use while shopping on your website. Check whether they prefer mobile shopping or via desktop or both. Before that, check your website in all major browsers and see how it looks in responsive design.
8) How much you know your customers?
9) What do your customers look for in a product or service on your website?
Step 2: Design Landing Pages:
A landing page is a purpose designed page which helps to prompt a certain action or result. A call-to-action (usually abbreviated as CTA) plays an important role for a successful landing page. We recommend not more than one call to action within a landing page. Some the popular landing page design tools used by online marketers include:
- Unbounce
- Instapage
- Wordstream
- Optimizely
- CrazyEgg
- Hubspot
- Visual Website Optimizer
- Ion Interactive
- Usability Tools
- LeadPages
- OptimizePress for WordPress
Step3: A/B & Multivariate Testing for Landing Page Optimization:
After collection the above information, it’s time to test your project based on your research. It is important to keep improving by making minor adjustments and optimizing your landing page conversion. A/B testing (or multivariate) is one of the most important aspects to improve lead generation i.e. overall conversion. Google Analytics Content Experiments is also used to create A/B tests inside Google Analytics.
Step 5: Review:
Before coming to any conclusion, make sure you have enough information to prove your hypothesis. Once you proved your hypothesis with reliable information, you are super powers in online marketing. But if your hypothesis was wrong, get ready to start again from step first i.e. research. Work hard than before, a little deeper into what’s stopping or discouraging visitors from converting. Sooner or later, you’ll figure out weaknesses of your website. Then, you can get rid of hurdles in your process and boost your conversion rate.
Zahoor Bhat has over 10+ years of experience as an online editor and media manager. He has worked with major online news and content sites as a media manager. He is well versed with major content management systems and web platforms such as WordPress and social media networks including Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Google Business, Yelp, Instagram & Linkedin. He is an expert in content creation, proofreading and finally making it live. Being a social media expert, he is able to make relations with social media influencers and make sure to generate leads and grow business via different social media platforms.
